The Irish diaspora

The Irish President Michael Higgins has been a welcome relief from the icy tones of the Martin  McGuinness or the combative Ian Paisley. The Irish diaspora in London are gathered in the Albert Hall to celebrate their tenacity for survival as a nation, away from home, joined as a people knowing their history and the personalised romance of their heroes. They have a unique blend of humour and pathos, of mythology and music, one minute calling out the demons  the next throwing off the gloom with the twirling skirt of a pretty waif, tapping her clog shorn feet to the exciting sound of a ceili.
The audience were up for the party, they were loyalists not afraid, as we have become with our multiculturalism   to shout allegiance to their history, to tell the world of their love for their past, warts and all. The symbolism of Yeats, of James Joyce, Bram Stoker, the words of the protest songs sprang from this cosmopolitan audience, the words were their words and they felt no hesitation to sing and identify with the cause.
How I wish we hadn't been indoctrinated to feel afraid of our shadow, the need to repeatedly apologise for the past. The past was a place inhabited by a different agenda when we were confident and sure of our motives. Today we shrink from any sort of suggestion that we made an effort to be even handed in our affairs or that making mistakes, as we did, is a judgement coloured by contemporary history. Our society has lost its centre, its median, its belief in what it stands for as it vacillates one way and the other, trying to be one thing to all people irrespective of 'their' multiple histories.        

http://twocents2012.blogspot.com.au/